"Cinema is the evening class for discriminating adults."--Ousmane Sembene

Saturday, December 13, 2014

SFFCC 2014—SECONDARY BALLOT

With the primary ballots of all the members of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle (SFFCC) tabulated, a secondary ballot has been formulated from which we must each choose and rank three of the five possible nominees. These will, in turn, be tabulated and—when we have our voting meeting on Sunday—we will be asked to choose between two (if there's a tie, three). Hedging towards that fateful day, here are my ranked choices. The final two in each list are those I have rejected.

Note: Here I have to object to the inclusion of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, despite the fact that it is delivered in Farsi, and despite the fact that I love the movie so much. As I have often argued here on The Evening Class, the concept of a national cinema—originally created to contest the hegemony of Hollywood product—has in recent years become all but obsolete with multi-lingual scripts and multi-national financing. The category will capsize altogether should it be given to a movie made by an American director on American locations, with a stylized use of Farsi. If SFFCC sets the precedent that all an American director has to do is make their film in a foreign language in order for it to be deemed a foreign film, then a valuable cultural distinction is lost and European cinemas, let alone Third World cinemas, will have been wrested of opportunity and fair share on the global stage. I hate to think that SFFCC would support such a hegemonic maneuver.